This cycle Democratic voters are electing mostly centrists with a smattering of leftists. What matters far more than these labels, which are basically about how much to spend on social welfare, is whether people broadly are seeing the threat of corporate concentration.
Just by watching hearings in Congress, it isn't really the left interested in the details of corporate power. There are some progressives who are there, but it's mostly the GOP, random centrists, and a few progressives who are trying to figure out how to structure commerce.
Small pharmacists have a lot of GOP support. Uber-centrist @MarkWarner has the boldest and most interesting views on Facebook/Google/Amazon. @RoKhanna and @SenWarren are doing important work on defense contract monopolies. And @SenWarren worked w/the GOP on hearing aid cartels.
Meanwhile Barbara Lee and Nancy Pelosi are nowhere on these questions, and Maxine Waters is helping deregulate banks. I like Waters and Lee very much. But the labels right now do not reflect that much that is meaningful, as the ideological environment is in flux.
There's a Democratic blind spot, and it's a huge one, and it wrecks the value of any labeling. Democrats simply cannot acknowledge that Obama both had agency and made singularly bad choices that hurt our society. Everything but that is open for debate. But that is what matters.
The blindspot is worldwide. Center-left parties, even in nation's with much stronger safety nets and universal health care, have collapsed everywhere. It's why the left-wing challenge in the U.S., which is based on more social safety net spending, isn't the answer.
To put it more pungently, no one argues that the problem with Weimar Germany's political order can be traced to its lack of health care options, yet that seems to be the diagnosis on the left today on why the world is trending quasi-fascist.
Eric Holder in 2016 was helping put the Democratic platform together. He is musing on running for President. That he can put this forward seriously without any actual pushback shows that there is no real integrity in the Democratic Party yet. Anywhere. Not on the left or right.
This is catastrophic for any actual discussion. Instead of saying the obvious, which is that Obamacare sucks because hospitals and drug companies are stealing, Democrats have to futz around with defending ACA or single payer discussions. So out of touch with actual experience.
Ask any Democrat running for office about the bailouts and they will largely have no idea what happened and why. Ask them about most areas of commerce and they will know very little. And if they do know something, they don't think it's a political topic.
The basic misdiagnosis is that the Republicans or the white working or Putin or whoever else are the problem. They are not. The problem is that Democrats do not see that the primary obstacles to liberty are financial concentrations of power. washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/janua…
Obama advisors are all over the world making policy now. They have to learn or be discredited. Dems can win elections on nothing, but can't govern that way. Every time Dems win and don't wield power democracy weakens and we shift closer to fascism.
Also, to note something that is not generally understood, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the ACLU, and most of the union world are split on corporate concentration. The labels do not always map to very much.
Yes, they can.
